MERRIN
((stories of Dragons and Princesses are as old as time, but how many have been told from that other point of view?))
My earliest memories are of darkness, damp caves, and of a Monster who sometimes fed me.
Sylvorum Titan-stalker was a flying black cloud of teeth and talons. His mastery of the silent glide made him the terror of the Sentinel Spires Mountain range. That Dragon’s reputation was so foul that no intelligent beings would deliberately enter his territory.
This was my father.
Of my mother, I know nothing. Sometimes, when Sylvorum would delve into his stores of intoxicating brews, he would mutter about some female named ‘Chrys’. Perhaps that was short for Crystal, perhaps that was her name.
I was a disappointment to my father. His habit of tormenting his prey before eating it nauseated me. His treasures; a bed of cold hard stones and bits of metal, was of no interest to me. Causing forest fires to forage for crispy treats among the ashes seemed wasteful to me. This, and other things, caused a deepening rift between us as time crawled by.
When by myself, I was content enough. Miserable, lonely, confused, yet content. Men, Dragons, Fey or what have you, we all seem to have a remarkable ability to be happy enough to go on living.
Then one day my Father summoned me from my favorite waterfall with a roar that started landslides in two nearby provinces. He ordered me to guard a new treasure he had acquired. It was called a Barbarian Princess, something he intended to trade for its weight in gold. How wonderful...
I soon confronted a strange sight, a little pink biped with a mop of black fur atop her head and clutching at scraps of other furs that were obviously not her own. The ‘Princess’ was small, and dark of hair and eye, but her spirit was bright enough to confront me directly. I was not nearly as terrible as Sylvorum, yet it must have required considerable courage to face me and ask;
“Are you going to eat me?”
The very idea of eating something that could converse with me was so repulsive and ridiculous that for a moment I was nonplussed. What in all creation would make her ask such a question? Being somewhat innocent, I thought about this, and eventually came up with a perfectly reasonable answer; this little talking beast must be close to starving! Why else would she be wondering what I would like to eat?
I foraged about the forest and soon returned with a collection of things that I thought might be edible. I really had no idea what humans were at this point, let alone what they might eat. The collection I placed before her was somewhat… varied. She took a few things, ate a little bit and placed some of the rest on a rock shelf behind her. Then, she thanked me and complained about nothing, introducing me to the concept of politeness. When she was done, I cleared the mess away (some of the things I had brought were offensive, even to me, I had to shoo away something that I had thought was a truffle). I then settled down to guard duty, although it was unclear to me what I was supposed to be guarding her from. She told me her name was Annarinda, and engaged me in conversation.
Her people had lived on the northern plateau for many generations. Drought and a series of other natural disasters had driven them south. In the lowlands they had not found the terrible armies that their Grandfathers had warned them about, but soft, fat simpletons who fell like wheat before their axes, when they were not running away. The Barbarian Warriors were so overjoyed at their success that they sent word back for their families to join them. So Annarinda had come south to join her Chieftain father, and rejoiced in his prosperity. The bounty of the lush south would see her people through the winter. For a change, none would starve of freeze to death. I had no objection to any of this; it was nature’s way that the strong would survive, and her people seemed happy enough.
And then Sylvorum had happened along…
The Barbarians had not been interested in Gold or gemstones, these things being inedible. Now, driven by my father’s ransom demands, they would have to attack strongholds they had earlier bypassed, and take terrible risks for this “treasure”. Despite the low regard my father held for me, and I him, I was intrigued by this.
For her part, Annarinda absorbed the details of my rather staid and boring life with rapt fascination. I became proud of my ability to entertain her, something I did with honest words without any Draconian embellishment or boastfulness. She even commented on my command of her native language, she said she could practically see the meaning of my words in her mind. I was too amazed to speak for a moment. Command of mannish tongues was the first step in learning spell magic, something that my father had continuously postponed. I corrected her, it was her facility with Draconian that allowed us to converse. Annarinda thought about this for a moment, and then smiled in a sly and secretive way.
“Can you hear me?” she asked. I had, of course, but then I realized something, a crucial fact that stopped my heart for a moment.
Her lips had not moved.
A witch! I nearly fled from her; I almost barged out of the cavern and brought Sylvorum down on us both. Before I could move more than a few feet, she explained it all to me in a strobe of mental images and ideas, and made the truth known to me in an instant. I sum it up in one word; Psychic. All creatures are supposed to have this power, although nearly all are latent as stones. Nearly all beings are deaf to the wonders that their own minds are capable of. One in a million can call this power forth in useful forms, and bend it to their will. This was my Annarinda, one in a million.
The next few days were a learning experience that was more like an unfolding, a revelation. It is impossible for me to tell you what it is , this process of discovery. Spend the first half of your life at the bottom of a well, and then climb out and tell me what the sun, the stars and the world around you looks and feels like. Do that, and you will have taken the first step in understanding us.
We no longer needed our voices to communicate, and to share in ways I had never dreamed of. Of course, I needed a certain amount of training in this, and in other things. Annarinda might have been a minor power by any standard, but her psi-energy flowed like a well-dammed mill stream; every erg was efficiently utilized. I, on the other hand, was like a raging torrent, tumbling through rapids without rhyme or reason. Under her tutelage, I found a rhythm that I could exploit. With a joy undiminished by oceans of time, I recall the first look I had at the outside world without my body leaving the cavern.
Annarinda was not teaching me to gain advantage over me, or worm her way out of her predicament. It is such a rare thing for people with our abilities to meet, that we naturally feel drawn to each other. As far as I know, I am the only Dragon thus gifted, so this spontaneous camaraderie is unusual for me, but that is just the way it was with Annarinda. That is how I remember it… and why should I not choose to do so?
And you, doubters and the unenlightened among you, how dare you question us? We, who owe nothing to your beliefs, you notions of mysticism or the way things ought to be! We are not only beyond your imaginings;
WE ARE.
Then came the night we went on a journey beyond ourselves. What a ghastly, wondrous feeling of total freedom and utter poverty it is to be separated from one’s own body! Your plasma tries to re-form itself in a tiny, wispy image of the flesh left behind. We did not fly so much as we seemed to dash with incredible speed from one vista to another.
Landmarks blinked by, and it was fortunate that I was not the pilot, but piggy-backing Annarinda’s guidance. Otherwise, I would have succumbed to vertigo before we had even left the places familiar to me. Soon, we seemed to be hovering above an encampment of more humans than I had thought could be living in the whole wide world. There were thousands of them, climbing into bed-rolls or lingering around fires. Our senses focused on a solitary female tending a small campfire. I was still so unfamiliar with humans that I could not sense a family resemblance, but there was a connection between her and Annarinda, who used her small powers to scratch letters in the dirt. The older woman smiled at this, and sat still for a moment, and then more words that I could not understand began to form.
I knew that a conversation was taking place, but this being was not broadcasting to us. Annarinda must be reading her mind. How is that done, I wondered. I gathered my energy into a needle-like projection and sent it lancing into her skull. This proved to be the wrong approach, and I regretted it immediately. Humans are mental pack-rats, storing away all sorts of worthless trivia in every corner of their heads. I felt like a librarian buried in a pile of manuscripts. I withdrew, and changed tactics, as well as the shape of my explorations. I cast a gossamer net of my own awareness over her head, hoping to catch active thoughts, and I succeeded.
How strange, how beautifully alien these thoughts were when I first heard them. A parent that actually cared for her offspring, and expressed it! “Be brave, we all pray for you. Daddy is doing everything he can, soon this will all be over. Baby… is a dragon near you?”
I had not been as stealthy as I had thought. I withdrew to meet Annarinda’s cold regard. Had I no respect for other people’s privacy? Had I no idea of the fear I could engender in anyone I might encounter? The combination of Dragon and thought-reader could cause blind panic among the masses.
This advice I headed for many years, only revealing the true extent of my powers to you all when it was time to assume the mantle of Empire-builder.
We returned to the caverns unnoticed by Sylvorum, of course. My father occasionally observed us, but all he noticed was that our conversations had ended, and that we seemed to be just sitting there, staring at each other. He was glad of this, the old fool; he took this to mean that I had finally become bored with her. I knew this because I had taken to reading his mind… what there was of it.
A few nights later he summoned me to his side. He was loudly agitated, and has consumed a good part of his supply of fermented Griffon’s milk. My sire was incensed at the slow pace with which the Barbarians paid the ransom he demanded. He proclaimed, with the solemnity and grand gestures of the cataclysmically drunk, to return Annarinda to them the same way her ransom was being paid; one little piece at a time.
Annarinda was still half asleep when she found herself perched on my back, my mental directions clamping her hands tight on my scales as we flew off into the night. Our nocturnal escape was exhilarating at first, then confusing, then dreary and ultimately became frustrating. Barbarians move, you see, and it was not until dawn that we finally found them. Also, Dragons rarely fly at night, air currents after dark mainly travel downwards.
{ While we are on this subject, I have heard that there are so-called Sages who have used maths to calculate that Dragons cannot actually fly. I have ceased banishing such men because I have come to agree with them. Dragons do not fly, we simply beat the atmosphere into submission. }
When we finally located Annarinda’s people, the sight they presented was yet another life-changing experience for me.
My father’s outrageous demands had driven the Barbarians to extreme measures. When we arrived, they had just stormed the walled city of Visograd, and sacked it. I say without hesitation that this was a fortress that no Dragon ever born could have taken down on his own, however these tiny yet vehement creatures had razed it in a matter of days! It had cost them dearly, but they had learned something about themselves in the process. They learned that they could do incredible things when they stopped and planned their work.
I have never forgotten the value of this kind of wisdom.
Annarinda’s mental shout saved us from a shower of arrows as I swept in and landed in the midst of them, staring about me with the same shock and curiosity that was being directed at mine own self. I had never understood just how many human beings there were in this world. Annarinda dismounted and ran to her father, and soon our story was known to them, as was my name. Soon I was experiencing what no non-psychic can ever understand. I basked in the admiration of the little souls all around me. In that moment, I think I came close to understanding something important… and then the moment was gone.
I sensed him before they saw him. I heard the cries, the wails of despair before I could even turn to face him. Sylvorum Elf-stalker scythed his way through the crowd with the sun at his back, his wings making hardly a sound. His approach was all the more nightmarish due to the speed of his arrival. He was focused on me, and his eyes promised nothing but bloody murder for me and mine. I snatched Annarinda up in my weaker claw and vaulted straight up into the sky.
My father, now determined to be my killer, heaved his wings and his breath started blowing through his nostrils like a straining ox. Yes, his rage at my betrayal gave him strength, but it also narrowed his vision. When he found us, Sylvorum has assumed that I was trying to claim the ransom for myself. When I bore my friend aloft to save her life, he went berserk. To him, I had betrayed my race, and become an affront to nature and tradition.
He would have caught us eventually, but escape was not my plan. I cast my new-found power over the old monster’s skull, and his thoughts were mine! Then, with one claw burdened and useless, with half his mass and none of his experience, I turned to battle Sylvorum to the death.
Much has been written of this battle, songs were sung of it. My own recollections are vague, muddied by the red haze of combat, and cannot do the bard’s tales justice. I was wounded seven times, blows struck by reflex that I could not possibly dodge. Other moves, such as brilliant snap-roll that should have put him on top of me, were turned against him. I stung him until he thought he was dying of a hundred tiny cuts. Soon he found himself with bleeding wings, flying so low that a stall would surely ground him. That was when he attempted to marshal his fiery breath against me. At the moment when a Dragon must release his breath, I wrapped my tail around his throat and kicked him in the stomach as hard as I could. I can testify that at that moment, he felt a taste of the horror he had visited on so many others, just as I intended he should.
His throat and chest erupted, and I was swatted out of the air by a chain-reaction of explosions that destroyed him utterly. Sylvorum landed in the forest, where his corpse burned and smoldered for two days. I crash-landed near the place I had taken off from. I was weak and bleeding from half a dozen places, but before I could surrender consciousness, I had to check on my precious passenger.
Historians and apologists have had much to say... to excuse me at this point. It is all garbage and nonsense, of course. I looked at the pulped and bloody mess in my claw, and I knew the truth at once, I knew that I had killed her.
Was it quick, too sudden for her to cry out to me? Did she hold herself quiet in some incredible triumph of willpower over pain, not wanting to distract me from a battle that would determine the fate of her people?
Dragon’s tears are said to have interesting qualities, some of them becoming gemstones. Do not make the mistake of showing me any jewels; I give such baubles away for a reason.
Annarinda’s people, good, honest folk, took me in and did what they could to shelter me from my grief. Somehow, they prevented me from doing harm to myself. These beautifully simple creatures thought that I had done something good. Even in my decrepit state, I was able to help them; who in their right mind would confront a tribe with a pet Dragon...?
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Yes, "Empire Builder", this story is the start of an auto-biography written by the Dragon himself many years later. In so many ways an a-typical Dragon, Merrin never obsessed about Gold of Gems, but he did have an obsession with another sort of treasure; sentient minds. The more he could gather around him, the better he felt. And so, it was perhaps inevitable that he would crown himself King, and then Emperor.
It was all a very long time ago, yet even after that Empire crumbled to dust and all the various races of Narva found new ways to live, they did not forget, and there is a group of words that remains etched in stone, and in their own mnds-
Merrin the Great,
the Great Gray Emperor of Lista
Founder of the Ulistarii Throne
the Killer of Kali and the bane of the Streegoi
Litch-Breaker
... but that's quite another story.the Great Gray Emperor of Lista
Founder of the Ulistarii Throne
the Killer of Kali and the bane of the Streegoi
Litch-Breaker
